At age 66, Cooper earned her doctorate in French history from the Sorbonne, defending her dissertation on slavery and the French Revolution.
On March 23, 1925, Anna Julia Cooper successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, "L'Attitude de la France à l'égard de l'esclavage pendant la Révolution" (France's Attitude Towards Slavery During the Revolution), at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne). At age 66, she became the fourth African American woman known to earn a Ph.D., and one of the first to do so in a European institution.
Her dissertation examined the contradiction between France's revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and its continued practice of slavery in its colonies, a topic deeply resonant with her own life experience as a formerly enslaved person turned scholar. The work demonstrated her rigorous historical scholarship and her lifelong commitment to connecting historical analysis with contemporary struggles for racial justice.
Achieving this doctorate required Cooper to overcome extraordinary obstacles: she pursued the degree while working full-time as an educator and administrator, raising five foster children, and navigating both racial and gender discrimination in academia. She had begun her doctoral studies at Columbia University but transferred her credits to the Sorbonne to complete the degree.
Her accomplishment stood as a powerful rebuttal to the era's pervasive racist and sexist assumptions about Black women's intellectual capacities. It cemented her legacy as a scholar-activist and remains a landmark achievement referenced in histories of African American education, women's higher education, and the broader struggle for civil rights.